Marion Winik


Marion Winik is a journalist and author, best known for her work on NPR's All Things Considered.

Early life and education

Winik was born in Manhattan in 1958 and grew up on the Jersey shore. She graduated from Brown University in 1978, majoring in History and Semiotics, and received her MFA from Brooklyn College in 1983.

Notable work

In her childhood and early twenties, Winik focused on writing poetry, publishing two collections, Nonstop and Boycrazy. Winik then began writing personal essays, which were published in The Austin Chronicle. These essays caught John Burnett's eye, who was an NPR reporter based in Austin at the time. He suggested that Winik she work as a commentator for All Things Considered and her first piece was published there in 1991. The following year, a literary agent contact her, resulting in the 1994 publication of Telling, a collection of Winik's essays.
A couple years later in 1996, Winik published First Comes Love, a memoir about her marriage to Tony, who died of AIDS in 1994. In her review of the book in the New York Times, Daphne Merkin wrote, "Marion Winik is resilient, hardy, unfazable; this self-described "suburban boho wannabe" is a frontier woman in disguise."